Category: relationships

The Emperor, Robotic Cats, and Suicide Among Elderly Men

Examining the reasons for the high suicide rate among elderly males.

I was just reading an article about suicide in the elderly and the author – a certified therapist with a PhD, mind you – suggested that a good preventative might be a robotic cat or dog that we could talk to and sleep with.  That way, we wouldn’t be lonely and, if we weren’t lonely, we wouldn’t be offing ourselves at record numbers.

Now, if you weren’t already suicidal, the idea of having to get a little cat robot to be your best friend would surely drive you over the edge.  It’s such a radiant example of NOT understanding suicide in the elderly that it’s almost breathtaking.

Here, kitty kitty!  Oh, shit, her batteries are dead.  Might as well just kill myself.

The, “reasons,” for elder suicide are all over the place.  According to the experts, it’s because we’re lonely, or we’re socially isolated, or we’re sick, or we don’t have jobs anymore, or our spouses died, or we’re invisible in a youth-culture, or we never get touched by anyone.

My very favorite is that elderly people commit suicide because they’re . . . drumroll, please . . . depressed.  

You think?

After spending several days combing through articles and studies about why elderly people kill themselves, I came to two conclusions.  One – nobody really knows why.  Two – nobody is very motivated to find out.  From a purely dollars and cents perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to social scientists to study elderly suicide because – hey! – old people are, you know, old.  Why spend a ton of money studying how to keep them alive when they’re supposed to die soon anyway?

They have pretty much pinned down the people at the highest risk. The person who is most likely to commit suicide in the United States is an elderly, white, male, introvert with a family history of suicide.

Males kill themselves four times more than females.  Apparently it’s one of our special skills, though it’s probably best to not note it on our resume’s.  No surprise, then, that those statistics would go across all of the age groups and extend into old age.

I can also understand the factor of the family history of suicide.  Perhaps that’s just a genetic predisposition to depression, but once you’ve seen suicide modeled in your own family, it’s hard to unsee it.

Introversion is a little harder to grasp, because it exists across such a broad spectrum and means so many different things to different people.  About 52% of the general population are introverts but most of them are obviously not suicidal.

Researchers have been quick to make the leap from introversion to loneliness and social isolation, though.  Under that model, introversion = social isolation, which = loneliness, which = depression which causes suicide.

Leaving aside the fact that those us with robotic cats are hardly lonely, other statistics would seem to refute this approach.  Elderly women actually report much higher levels of feeling socially isolated and much higher levels of feeling lonely than elderly men.  If there was causation from those factors, we’d expect to see the gender statistics reversed, with women killing themselves at four times the rate of men.

There’s another interesting difference we can discern when we look at a recent study from UCLA.  Dig this:

“What’s striking about our study is the conspicuous absence of standard psychiatric markers of suicidality across all age groups among a large number of males who die by suicide,” said Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. They found that 60% of victims had no documented mental health conditions.

In other words, the standard perception of suicide as being caused by long term mental illness simply isn’t born out.  Suicidal men aren’t crazy, they’re just suicidal.

So, if elderly men aren’t killing themselves because they’re more lonely, more isolated, crazier, or more introverted than everyone else, what’s causing it?

I suspect that a large part of it may lie in another part of the description, which is, “white male.”

Of all of the many groups in the United States, there is no group that is more likely to fully participate in the toxic masculine paradigm than the Caucasian male.  We have, simply by being born with white skin, more access to the education and financial resources that enable us to become completely enmeshed in the insane pursuit of money, power, and position.  We abandon our own authenticity in that lifelong pursuit.

When we look at the Tarot card, The Emperor, we see the ultimate outcome of that paradigm.  Yes, he’s sitting on a throne and he’s powerful.  He’s also completely and totally alone, covered from head to toe in his armor.  Everything around him is a blasted, sterile wasteland. No friends.  No lovers.  No family.

He doesn’t even have a fucking robotic cat to sit on his lap.

When we talk about toxic masculinity, we mainly frame it in terms of the negative effects that it has on women who come into contact with it.  We tend to forget that it’s the men who are carrying all of those toxins around with us.  And it’s killing us.

Is it likely that white American males will begin to look at the female paradigm or perhaps people of color and try to figure out why we’re killing ourselves and they’re not?  Probably not.  On the other hand, artificial intelligence is improving by leaps and bounds.  It’s only a matter of time – hopefully a very short time – until we’ll all have robotic cats and dogs who can actually talk to us and help us deal with our emotional problems more realistically.

Here kitty kitty!  I have some brand new batteries for you, sweetheart.

I am very pleased to announce that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is now available FOR FREE on Amazon for anyone who has a Kindle Unlimited membership. The cheapest robotic cat that they offer is $113.00 so this is just one hell of a deal.

Toxic Masculinity, The Inner Marriage, and Percolating Testicles

On the exterior level, the Two of Cups obviously represents two people who are falling in love.  On a deeper level, though, it represents the Inner Marriage, the harmonious joining of the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine in one person’s Soul.  In a sense, it represents learning to fall in love with yourself.  Or maybe your Self.

I was watching an interview about that the other day and I got plumb confused.  The speaker was discussing the way that her Tantric Tradition deals with the Yin/Feminine and Yang/Masculine energies that we all contain.  I followed the beginning of it with no great problem.  Obviously, every human being incorporates both Yin and Yang and we give greater or lesser expressions to those energies at different times in our lives.

Then she got off into some territory where I felt like I needed to make a chart to keep track of it all.  She said that every person has a Yin and a Yang, but women’s Yin have a Yang within the Yin and men’s Yang have a Yin within the Yang.   The Yang in women’s Yin is apparently centered at  the birth canal, because that’s where they project their being into the world.  The Yin in men’s Yang is located in their testicles because that’s where they hold life and sort of . . . . um . . . percolate it.

It all just seemed really complicated.

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not in any way making fun of that tradition or denigrating it.  In fact, I was really impressed that someone had invested that much time and effort thinking about testicles because most of us are perfectly happy to let them just hang around without analyzing them too much.  Men, in particular, consider their testicles as really good buddies, despite the fact that they seem to cause a lot of problems in the world.

What came through to me, though, is how much more women have advanced than men in thinking about all of this.  Despite the recent legal set-backs in reproductive rights, the women’s movement remains relatively robust.  Women continue to question and examine their roles in society and try to sort out their emotional energies.  The men’s movement on the other hand . . . um . . . oh, that’s right . . . there IS no men’s movement.

Well, there IS a sort of a men’s movement, but it’s pretty horrifying.  It seems to be based on the idea that men have a divine right to be belching, farting, weight lifting, muscle car driving, gun toting swine and that anyone who questions that is a bitch or a fairy.  If you type, “Toxic Masculinity,” into the YouTube search bar, here are a few of the videos that come up:

THE WAR ON MEN

START INCREASING TOXIC MASCULINITY LIKE A REAL MAN

THE RISE OF WEAK MEN: BREAKING DOWN TOXIC MASCULINITY IN AMERICA TODAY

THE INSIDIOUS TOXIC MASCULINITY MYTH IS HARMING HUMANITY

Here’s a screen shot from one of them that kind of says it all:

Ironically, there’s a female side to that story, as well.   Under the same topic we find vids (by women) with titles like:

DON’T BE A SIMP:  WOMEN LIKE BAD BOYS

WOMEN HATE MEN WHO ARE IN TOUCH WITH THEIR, “FEMININE

SIDE”

WHY WOMEN CRAVE DOMINANCE

and my personal favorite:  MEN TRY TO GUILT US BY BEING, 

“NICE.”

So there seem to be a fair number of women who don’t want any Yin in their Yangs.  Men, of course, take note of that and process it as, “Yeah, I know they SAY they want sensitive men but I’ll never get laid by being evolved.”  And, really, we even see quite a few, “feminists,” who are still dating knuckle draggers because it, “just feels right.”

Despite all of that, I still see a fair amount of hope on the sexual horizon.  For one thing, we virtually never see a debate over what it means to be a REAL woman.  Women seem to be pretty accepting of each other’s life choices now days and career women and lesbians are just as welcome in the tribe as homemakers and mommies. 

Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker recently got into some serious trouble by suggesting that women are much more fulfilled by having babies than they are by having careers.  A lot of Yins suggested cutting his Yang off, but it really hasn’t been that long since that would have been considered normal speech.

Up until the late 1960s, it was commonly accepted that the only, “natural,” role for women was producing babies until their uteruses fell out.  A corollary to that was the widely held stereotype that only women who had large breasts were truly sexy, a belief that must have made most women feel fairly uncomfortable. 

Thankfully, a huge amount of the sexual stereotyping around women has fallen away.  Unfortunately, men seem to still be stuck at first base, he said, using a very masculine, butch sports metaphor.  So what is it going to take for men to dribble their balls down the court and kick one over the goal posts for a home run?

Well, first and foremost, it’s going to involve men actually claiming that Yin side of their nature and saying, “Yes, REAL men have sensitivities and emotions and needs and men who don’t have them aren’t real in any human sense of the word.”

And, second, it going to involve more women letting go of that toxic stereotype, as well.  As long as women continue to have sex with emotionally primitive men, men will continue to be emotionally primitive.

I mean, why wouldn’t they?

Love, Therapy, Ram Dass, and God in Drag

A look at the sources of love.

I’ve been reading a book called, “Getting the Love You Want,” by a psychotherapist named Harville Hendrix.  The theme of the book is basically, “We all fall in love, a lot of us fall out of love, and here’s how to fix that.”  He’s a smart guy, did some excellent analysis, and I’d probably recommend the book.

But he never did get into that basic question of, “What IS love?”

Now, there’s been an awful lot of brain and biochemistry research over the last 20 years.  What the scientists have determined is that when we magically meet, “the right person,”  giant sparks fly out of both our genitals and our subconscious minds, then our brains start pumping huge amounts of endorphins, and – SHAZAM! – we’re in love.

That’s what we could call the, “reductionist,” approach to love.  What we call love is ultimately reduced to brain and body chemicals that cause us to feel wonderful.  From that point of view, love is nothing more than a biochemical reaction – probably based on the need for the species to procreate – that we dress up with a lot of romantic notions, boxes of candy, and Hallmark cards.

It’s a classic case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts, though.  Love isn’t just hormones.

Love is an energy.  When we have it in our lives, we don’t just feel better, our lives actually work better.  Its presence seems to trigger huge amounts of synchronicity and serendipity, we suddenly have solutions to most of the problems that we encounter, and we’re harmonious with the Tao, the Universal Flow.  When we don’t have it, life can feel like a meaningless slog through knee deep mud.

So the obvious course of action seems to be that we should all run right out, throw a net over someone, and fall in love with them.  Unfortunately, as Hendrix pointed out, right around 50% of us fall out of love, which is extremely painful, and we’re right back where we started, only we hurt a little more than we did before and we’re a lot more cynical.  Then we go back out, find another person to fall in love with, and rinse and repeat. 

 As much as Americans revere the idea of finding our Soul Mates, most of us are actually serial monogamists, who find one Soul Mate after another after another until one of them finally sticks.

I got a BIG clue on all of this a few years ago when I was listening to a Ram Dass talk after my partner had died.  He said that the reason that we feel so devastated after a death, a divorce, or a break up is that we mistake the person for the love.  The person is the vehicle that gets us to the love, not the love itself.  Since we have so totally identified the love with the person, though, when they go away it feels as if all of the love has gone away.

As near as I’ve been able to figure out, there are basically three sources of love.  There’s the love we derive from our relationships with other people.  There’s self-love, which so many of us struggle to achieve.  And then there’s the love that flows out of our spiritual connection with Source Energy, the god-head, the Tao, the Flow.

The trick is to understand that all three of the different forms are actually the same energy, the Source Energy, dressed up in different costumes.

Human beings are hardwired to receive love from other human beings.  And that’s a very good thing, indeed.  It’s like a built in on-ramp to Source Energy and it should be an effortless, natural process.  Unfortunately, the second that we enter the world, a lot of other ingredients get added to that process.  We start out with pure love and then we throw in crazy parents, cultural expectations, dysfunctional partners, etc., etc., etc, until the love becomes a shit show.  

Then we find ourselves sitting in a therapist’s office, asking, “What happened?  All I wanted was for someone to love me.  What happened?”  If we’re blessed with a really good therapist, we can start to untangle those knots and sort it all out.  “Okay, this part of the shit show came from your depressed mother and this part of the shit show came from high school and this part of the shit came from your ex-husband.”  As we identify and subtract more and more of the added ingredients that doomed our relationships, we move closer to that model of pure love that we were born with.

Where our culture lets us down, though, is in not identifying the actual origin of that energy that we call, “love.”  When we finally realize that the love is flowing OUT of Source and THROUGH our partners, then we can wake up and realize, “Huh . . .the love is always there and it’s abundant.  I can find it through my partners, but I can find it in a lot of other ways, too.  I can actually love myself.  I can meditate on Source.  I can connect with that energy in a zillion different ways.”

That’s not to put down romantic love in any way.  Romantic love is a grand sort of a feeling and it’s probably the fastest way for us, as a species, to reach that love energy.  BUT . . . it’s not the origin of the energy.

Perhaps the best solution is something else that Ram Dass suggested:  “Treat everyone you meet as if they were God in drag.”  When we start looking at the people we love as little bits of that God/Goddess/Love energy shining out at us through their human forms, then we can honor them, honor the process, and honor the love.

The Five of Pentacles, Karma, and God’s Little Baskets of Muffins

Transforming ourselves through karmic selfishness.

I have a younger friend who HATES karma.

More specifically, he hates when he’s in the middle of an, “Oh poor me,” bitching session and someone shrugs her shoulders and says, “Well, that’s karma.”  

First of all, it interrupts the rhythm of his complaining and he has to go back and remember what he was so upset about.  

“What was I saying?  I know it was important . . . oh, I remember . . . life is meaningless and no one understands me . . .”

Secondly, it infuriates him because it suggests that the mess he finds himself in is somehow HIS fault and the whole point of his rap is that it’s everything and everyone else’s fault.  Which is just further proof that no one understands him.

This guy was raised by a Buddhist and that may have something to do with his constant irritation.  It’s developmentally important that teenagers be able to rebel against their parents.  The first way that we really begin to define who we are in the world is by making it clear that we aren’t our parents.  I imagine that it must be pretty damned difficult for a teenager to get any rebellion traction against a Buddhist parent.

“You know, Dad, sometimes I really hate you.”

“Well, son, all strong emotions will pass if we simply do a little deep breathing.  Remember, you’re the sky and your emotions are just clouds drifting by.”

Or

“I’ve been think about getting a tattoo.  What do you think about that?”

“Ah . . . perhaps you should get a tattoo of a double dorje or some other sacred symbol.  In a sense, it would be a constant reminder of the spiritual nature that dwells in physical matter.”

Or

“Maybe I’ll paint my face blue and dye my hair orange.”

“Hmmm . . . I wonder if you were a Druid in a past life.  Do you feel a particular attraction to oak trees?”

Aargh!  So it’s possible that this guy was deeply emotionally scarred by all of that loving kindness and unconditional acceptance from his parents.  If only they’d yelled at him or told him he was an idiot occasionally!  

Still, he does have a bit of a point about the notion of karma.

It’s perfectly understandable that people get a little riled up over the idea of crappy things happening to them because of what they may have done in a past life.  After all, most of us have absolutely no memory of our past lives and so it feels like we’re being punished for something that someone else did.  

Suppose I was Attila the Hun in a past life and in a fit of Barbarian Rage I whipped out my scimitar and beheaded a turtle.  Then 200 lifetimes later –   as Dan Adair –  I’m in a traffic accident and I get whiplash BECAUSE I decapitated that turtle.  That seems a little . . . unjust.  I mean, I’m NOT Attila in any sort of a meaningful sense, so why should I get sent to the principal’s office because Attila was a dick?

And then, to make it even worse, when I’m sitting there in my cervical collar reflecting on exactly HOW unjust it all is, an acquaintance says, “Oh, well, that’s karma.”  As my younger friend would put it:  “Fuck you.”

Now, there’s a particularly odious Christian doctrine called, “predestination.”  It holds that some people are born with the unchangeable destiny that they’re going to heaven when they die. Other people are born with the unchangeable destiny that they’re going straight to hell when they die.  It doesn’t matter what we do or how we behave, our ultimate destiny has already been decided at the moment of birth.

It’s like God is up there in the Kosmic Kitchen baking up human Souls and, as he pulls each one out of the Soul Muffin Pan, he tosses them into separate baskets marked, “Heaven,” and, “Hell.”

“Okay, heaven, heaven, heaven – whoops, you’re fucked – hell, heaven, fucked again, heaven . . .”  Like the beggars in the Five of Pentacles, we’re out in the cold and we’re going to stay there.

Theologians came up with a perfectly logical reason for this totally insane doctrine.  The idea is that God is all powerful and all knowing.  So if God knows everything, then that must mean that he knows everything that happened in the past, the present, AND the future!  And if God already knows what’s going to happen in the future, then he must already know who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell.  Shazam!  There you are – it’s already determined.

That’s the kind of weird, Left-Brain, cuckoo for coco puffs vibe that a lot of people get off of the notion of karma.  It seems to be some sort of an inexorable process that was put into motion a long time before we came along and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.  We’re either in the Heaven Basket or we’re in the Oh, You’re So Fucked Basket.  Like it’s something that happens TO us for no particular reason.

Of course, the important point that most of us miss is that karma isn’t happening to us, we’re happening to karma.  It’s a totally dynamic process and it’s something that we can change every single day simply by the ways that we behave right now.

The most simplistic way to think of it is as a sort of a bank account.  Rather than being born into a You’re-Going-to-Hell Basket or a You’re-Going-to-Heaven Basket, we’re born with a certain amount of Karmic Kash that we earned (or didn’t earn) in past lives.  The Dalai Lama will probably be reborn with several savings accounts, a really huge checking account, many certificates of deposit and a great coin collection.  Attila the Turtle Beheader, on the other hand, will be reborn with 50 cents in the bank and a lot of overdue bills.

The thing is, though, that the way that we’re born isn’t our destiny.  The way that we behave is our destiny.  Attila, for instance, might start a refuge for homeless turtles.  Every single time that he saves a turtle and gives it a meaningful life – KA -CHING – that’s another deposit in his Karma Account.  The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, might decide to support Eric Trump for President and – ZAP – that’s a major withdrawal from his Karmic Account.

As David Michie said in, “Buddhism for Busy People,” 

In what is one of the most outstandingly ingenious aspects of Buddhist teachings, we come to realize that our own selfish interests lie in being altruistic . . .months, years or decades of being generous for selfish reasons begin to have a predictable effect . . .what starts out as a contrived and self-conscious change of attitude and behavior results in a genuine metamorphosis.

In other words, we don’t have to start out as Mother Theresa or an Awakened Master.  We can start out as perfectly normal, selfish, self-centered human beings who are being kind to other beings because we DON’T want to end up wearing a cervical collar.  When we pick up a turtle that’s in the middle of the road and leave it safely on the other side, we can be doing it for the completely selfish reason of wanting to fill up our Karmic Account.

As we continue those little acts of kindness they gradually transform us.  They become acts of loving/kindness, where we’re actually noticing and caring about the welfare of the people and beings around us.  The translation of the word, “karma,” is, “action,” and that’s the key.  Our actions change us, even if they originate in selfishness.

And that’s how Attila the Hun becomes the Dalai Lama.  Pretty simple.

Christmas Candy, the Meaning of Giving, and Tibetan Meditation Centers

Making our lives into gifts.

Here in the United States we’re just finishing up the annual emotional and commercial orgy of Christmas, also known as, “the season of giving.”  It started me thinking about the nature of giving and, oddly, a Tibetan meditation center I toured over 20 years ago.

Our guide was a woman who lived there with the improbable name of, “Candy.”  I’m guessing that trying to explain the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy to a group of tourists in Bermuda shorts was not the highlight of her day, but she was pleasant, kind, and patient.  One of the concepts that she put in a nutshell for us was the idea of accumulating merit.

“We get up in the morning with the idea of helping other sentient beings and, if we do that, it earns us karmic merit.  And then, instead of clinging to that merit for ourselves, we dedicate it to the good of other sentient beings.  Which accumulates more merit, which we dedicate to the good of other sentient beings.”

I glanced around at the people I was with and their faces were frozen in expressions that pretty much conveyed, “I don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about, but you seem relatively harmless.”  To me, though, it was a major revelation.  In just those few sentences, I understood the concept of giving with absolutely no expectations of getting anything back.  It’s been something I’ve gone back to again and again over the last two decades.  A lasting treasure.

Now, here’s the thing:  I feel absolutely sure that Candy had no idea that she was making a major impact in another person’s life and thoughts.  We spent maybe 30 minutes with her and I’ve never seen her again, but I still remember that moment like it happened yesterday.  It was a gift, and the gift was her just living her life and telling her truth.

We tend to think of giving as being something that’s transactional and we can see that idea illustrated in the Six of Cups.  The little boy is giving a gift of love (symbolized by the Cup) to the little girl.  Implicit in that image is the next step in the transaction, where the little girl is going to say, “Oh, hey!  What a nice cup!  Thanks so much for thinking of me.”

And then we feel good because we’ve made someone we care about feel good and we feel good about ourselves because, after all, we were thoughtful enough to give something nice to someone we care about.  When we put all of the commercialism and forced jolliness aside, that’s part of the sweetness of Christmas – it’s a chance to give something to others and tell them we love them.

Most of us feel pretty disconnected with that in our general, everyday lives, though.  We may get up in the morning with the intentions of being, “good,” people.  We’re loving with our life partners, we don’t snap at the cashier in the grocery store, we smile at our co-workers and try to work hard at our jobs.  As near as I can tell, right around 90% of us are good people, in the sense that we make some effort to not be shit heads and to be decent to our fellow humans.

Still, a lot of us are afflicted with a sense of meaninglessness.  We feel like we’re slow walking through life in a sort of a daze and we’re not really making any difference.  It’s like we’re born, we eat a lot of t.v. dinners, and then we die and we wonder if anything we’ve done actually matters.

That’s where synchronicity and a leap of faith comes in.  That’s where giving with no sense of attachment to the results comes in.

Each one of us is absolutely unique.  There’s never been anyone exactly like us before and there will never be anyone exactly like us again.  To the extent that we celebrate that uniqueness and share our own individual truths in our lives, we become a walking, talking, breathing gift to the world.

But we almost HAVE to detach that gift from results.  If we make our giving transactional – which is to say, someone saying, “Thank you for being you,”  – we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment.  The fact of the matter is that most people don’t even see us, in any sort of a meaningful way.  Like us, they’re hustling and bustling through life, trying to pay their bills, hoping they’ve got some clean socks, trying to figure out what in the hell they can cook for their kids that isn’t a t.v. dinner.

And if they do notice us, the odds are that they’re seeing us through so many perceptual filters that they don’t see who we really are.  As the old Indian adage goes, “When a pickpocket looks at a saint, all he sees is pockets.”  

So, we have to make a little leap of faith that we ARE being seen without knowing that we are.  And that we ARE making a difference in other people’s lives and in the world, without any proof that it’s so.  Sometimes it may be like Candy at the meditation center, where words we speak become seeds that grow in other people’s lives.  Sometimes it may be as simple as smiling at a person we pass on the street, never knowing that they were depressed and suicidal until they saw our smile.

We can see that in another card, the Ace of Cups.  The cup represents love flowing into the world, but, unlike the Six of Cups, it’s not attached to anything.  It’s not something we have to earn.  It’s not dependent on being thanked or being noticed or appreciated.  It’s just there in the world and it makes life better by its very presence.

When we finally get it that we’re giving to the world around us and making a difference just by being us to the fullest extent that we can, then we shift into having meaning in our lives because we ARE making a difference.  We may not see it.  Perhaps no one will ever tell us.  Maybe it will take twenty years for that good to ripen in someone else’s life, but we DO matter.  Every single day.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available on Amazon for less than the price of a meaningless t.v. dinner and it’s twice as nutritious!

Atheist Tarot Readers, Defective Jesus, and Finding a New God-Person

The pragmatism of polytheism.

I have a friend who is an atheist Tarot card reader and it tickles me no end.  I like to rag on her a bit and ask her, “Who do you think is answering your questions when you do a reading?  Maybe atheist angels or agnostic spirit guides?”  

Which generally earns me a dirty look or a shrug.  She reads Tarot cards.  She’s an atheist.  It’s not up for discussion.

Now, she’s kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.  The rock is that she was reading Tarot cards for many years before she became an atheist, so she knows that they actually work.  When you sit down with a deck of cards and do a reading, you get answers and the answers are generally (not always) right on.

The hard place is that she went through a series of very painful life experiences that led her to conclude that there’s no God and that religion is nothing more than superstitious nonsense.  That conclusion wasn’t arrived at in a frivolous manner because she was genuinely suffering in her life, she prayed for help, and nothing much happened.

It’s a pretty simple equation, right?  We’re told that there’s some sort of a God-person out there, that he loves us, and that if we’re in trouble he’ll come zooming in and rescue us.  So, if we do our part by (a) getting in trouble and (b) praying for help and the God-person doesn’t do his part by (c) zooming in and rescuing us, then it’s logical to conclude that the God-person either doesn’t exist or else he’s pretty useless.

I’m actually very sympathetic with my friend, the atheist Tarot reader, because I had a similar experience when I was in my mid-forties.  My father had just killed himself, I lost my job and had to declare bankruptcy, my house was repossessed, and my mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease.

All of this happened within a one year span of time.  My life went from being perfectly normal to being a total shit-burger in the wink of an eye.  I was so chewed up by life that I had to look up to see the bottom and if it weren’t for bad luck, “I wouldn’t have had no luck at all.”  Life had chewed me up, spit me out, and then stomped on me with hob-nail boots to be sure I’d stay on the ground.

I was living in Texas at the time and there’s a fundamentalist christian under every rock and behind every cactus in Texas.  It was probably inevitable, then, that one of them said, “Dan, you just need to get down on your knees and pray to Jesus for help.”  And I did.  I was raised up in the catholic church, so the concept of praying to Jesus wasn’t exactly foreign to me and I thought, “Well, shit . . . what do I have to lose?”  Nothing.

So I commenced praying and I prayed and prayed and prayed and asked Jesus to help me in my misery and travails and – SHAZAM! – nothing happened.  No heavenly hosts of angels appeared, Jesus didn’t invite me for a walk in the garden and no one anointed my fevered brow with soothing oils.  I continued to be royally fucked.

But, unlike my friend, the atheist Tarot reader, I didn’t throw my hands in the air and declare that God is dead and it’s just a cold, hard universe.  Instead, I analyzed my situation and thought, “Well, I’m in trouble, I prayed to the God-person to come zooming in and help me, and nothing happened.  Obviously, I have a defective God-person.  He’s not working, so I’ll just send him back.  I need to find a God-person who can get the job done.”

I did a lot of research on Gods and Goddesses and finally settled on Hecate’, the Goddess of the Cross Roads.  She seemed like a good fit because I was definitely at a cross roads in my life and I needed to know which way to turn.  I prayed and prayed and prayed and asked Hecate’ to help me in my misery and travails and – SHAZAM! – something happened.

In fact, quite a bit happened, just like magic.  I met a woman on line, fell in love with her, moved to California and we lived together for 19 years.  My life went from being an absolute shit-burger to being wonder-full in the wink of an eye.

Now, I’m not writing all of this as some sort of an anti-Jesus screed or to praise the wonders of Hecate’.  I know a few christians who swear up and down that Jesus answers their prayers and they seem like nice, honest people.  Maybe they got a Jesus model that wasn’t defective and he sort of works if they don’t take too close a look at him.  Maybe Jesus was just a bad fit for me – could be that he doesn’t like my haircut or tie dyed shirts.  I don’t know.  I just know he didn’t work.

Which leads me back to my friend, the atheist Tarot reader.  Like me, she tried praying to her God-person and nothing happened, nothing got better.  She quite logically realized he was a defective model and sent him back.  Fortunately, she was still able to hang on to her Tarot cards and say, “These DO work, so I’m not sending them back.”

The point being that we have a sort of a pragmatic, mostly unspoken, contract with our God-persons.  It’s something along the lines of, “Okay, God-person, we’ll pray to you and we’ll build all of these very grandiose temple-houses for you to live in and we’ll pay the salaries of your priest-persons.  You, on the other hand, will help us, console us, give us guidance, and zoom in to help us when we’re in trouble.”

Unfortunately, humans have a long history of making excuses for their God-persons.  In many instances, it’s as if the God-person is on vacation when we’re in trouble, or perhaps he has Attention Deficit Disorder and it just slips his mind that we’re hanging off the edge of a cliff holding on to a single branch.  In the worst instances, the God-person seems to behave like some sort of a deranged sadist who LIKES wrecking people’s lives and we just pray that maybe he won’t notice us while he’s in a bad mood.

In those instances, it’s perfectly acceptable to just say, “Okay, God-person – I held up my end of the bargain and you didn’t hold up yours.  It’s been sweet, but I think we both know this isn’t working out.”

And it’s also perfectly acceptable to find another God-person.  Just because this relationship is ending, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have another relationship.  There’s no reason to accept the christian line that there’s only ONE God-person and that we mustn’t ever be unfaithful to him, even when he’s being unfaithful to us.  What a narcissist!

It’s actually a great big universe out there and there are plenty of God-persons to choose from.  If we’re stone-cold poor, for instance, we might want to talk to Lakshmi, the Goddess of Abundance.  If we’re facing insurmountable obstacles, Ganesh specializes in removing them.  If we’re in need of healing, talk to Tara.  If we have no love in your lives, pray to Quan Yin.

I think that you’ll find that most God-persons are actually quite nice entities.  For the most part, they seem to have healthy boundaries.  They don’t follow you around and spy on what you’re doing.  They don’t have temper fits and throw you out of the garden just because you ate an apple.  They seem to have a lot of unconditional love and won’t ask you to sacrifice your first born son.  And they actually work.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” a practical guide to reading Tarot cards, is still available on Amazon for less than you’d pay for a small order of jalapeño poppers and will last a lot longer.

The Rules of Synchronicity, Having Sex with Pizzas, and Becoming More Flow-ish

Basic rules for increasing synchronicity in your life and getting in the Flow.

We’re all familiar with that state of being that we call, “being in the Zone,” or, “being in the Flow.” Both artists and athletes talk about the special state of consciousness where their work becomes completely focussed, everything they want to accomplish unfolds effortlessly and the perception of time seems to be suspended. When we’re in the Flow, life becomes a magical mystery tour and feels like a perfect fit instead of a struggle.

There are dozens of books out there on the subject of the Flow, but my favorite is Charlene Belitz groundbreaking book The Power of Flow. She noted that when we’re in the Flow state, we have a marked increase in synchronistic events and she thought, “Hmmmm . . . if synchronicity goes along with the Flow state like cheese dip goes with Doritos . . . then that means that when one occurs, the other occurs, too. So . . . if we can increase synchronicity, maybe we can increase being in the Flow.”

And it works. I tried it. When I trigger extra synchronicity in my life, then my life begins to hum along much more smoothly and I feel happier, more content, and easier in my spirit. I may not be in the Flow constantly, but I’m sure as hell a lot more Flow-ish and that feels pretty good.

When we boil down synchronicity and then hang it on the line to dry, it basically just means that the universe is having a conversation with us. Carl Jung defined it as, “a meaningful convergence of interior and exterior events,” which is really just a formal way of saying that the universe is noticing what we’re thinking and interacting with our thoughts.

The classic example is when we’re sitting there thinking about our Great Aunt Petunia Lilac Huckleberry, whom we haven’t spoken to in 25 years, the phone rings and – Shazam! – it’s Aunt Petunia and she has something really important to tell us. Now, we can dissect that and analyze it and pick it apart a million ways to Sunday, but there are really only three things we need to focus on here: (1) We thought of Aunt Petunia; (2) Aunt Petunia called us; and (3) it was meaningful.

That sort of thing happens to all of us on what seems to be a completely random basis. Since it’s random – in other words, we’re not consciously causing it to happen – we just call it a coincidence. We shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, that was damned weird,” and just forget about it.

On the other hand, when we recognize that it’s really a thing – that we can make things like that happen – then it becomes a force in our lives. We start experiencing synchronicity a lot more because we’re asking for it to happen. And as we experience more synchronicity, then we find ourselves more and more in the Flow and life becomes a LOT easier.

There are some simple rules involved with causing more synchronicity to appear in our lives. I’ve stumbled across some of them as I’ve explored the subject and want to share them in a few ongoing posts, so I’ll start with this one.

SYNCHRONICITY RULE NUMBER ONE: START THE CONVERSATION

The first rule is to realize that there is something out there talking with us, having meaningful conversations, and giving us answers when we need them. BUT . . . whatever it is, it doesn’t usually start the conversation. We need to reach out to whatever it is first, and then it replies to us.

Human beings have realized that there was something out there talking with us for most of our existence and we’ve tried to fill in the blanks about who or what it is. Some people perceive the something out there as angels and spirit guides. Some people perceive it as Fairies. Some people see it as Jesus answering their prayers. Some people think of it in impersonal terms, like the Tao.

It doesn’t matter! We don’t have to figure out exactly what it is that’s talking back to us in order to have the conversation. If you feel more comfortable calling it Jesus, that’s fine. If you prefer Spirit Guides, that’s fine, too. If you just want to call it, “Hey, you,” then go for it. The main thing is to just realize that it’s there, it has answers for you, and it’s waiting for you to ask for them.

So, suppose you have a new boyfriend and he seems to be just perfect. He’s charming, good looking, he’s well read, fun to be with, has lots of money to throw around, and you think he may be The One. BUT . . . as the relationship develops you discover that the only way that he can have sex is to slather himself in tomato paste and cover his body with slices of pepperoni. Unless he’s dressed up as a pizza, he’s completely impotent in bed and you’re highly conflicted about this because you don’t much care for pizza and you certainly don’t want to eat it every night. It’s a conundrum and you need some guidance about your choices in the matter.

So what do you do? You just stop and say, “Hey, you, (or Jesus or Fairies or Tao) what should I do about this? I think I love the guy, but shtupping Italian food just really doesn’t turn me on.” And then you take a walk or go to work or throw all of your tomato covered bed sheets in the washer and wait for an answer.

And the answer will come. It may be something as dramatic as the local Round Table Pizza burning to the ground or it may be as subtle as finding a can of tomato paste that’s been run over by a truck, but the answer will come. Once we ask the question, the universe will always find a way to let us know what we need to do.

Which leads us to Rule Number One (a):

DON’T BE AN ASKHOLE

Have you ever had a friend who was constantly asking for your advice but never took it? They come to you with one problem after another, ask what they should do, and then manufacture endless reasons for why they can’t possibly do what you suggested.

They’re basically being askholes. They’re not really interested in solutions, they’re just interested in the drama of their problems. We may occasionally lose our tempers and blow up at those people but more often we just fade away. We start avoiding them as much as we can and, if they corner us, we just nod and say, “Uh, huh. Golly. How ‘bout that? Gee whiz.”

We’ve learned that they’re never going to follow our advice and so we stop giving it. The Universe (or Jesus or Fairies or the Tao or Hey You) is very much like that. If we ask for help with something, it will always respond with an answer. But . . . if we continually ignore the advice, then Hey You will start avoiding us and ignoring our questions because it knows we don’t really want an answer.

So, in the example above, the Universe might suggest that you leave the guy, or it might suggest that you sprinkle him with Parmesan cheese before you have sex, or it might suggest that you ask him to dress up like a grilled cheese sandwich instead of a pizza and see how THAT goes. Whatever form the advice comes in, we need to act on it. If we don’t, the advice will just stop coming. If we do, then the advice will increase, synchronicity will increase, and we’ll find ourselves more and more in the Flow.

I’ll be offering some more insights on how to increase synchronicity in the next few posts. In the meantime, ask and ye shall receive. Askhole and ye shall not.

Remember that my ebook, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon for less than the price of a single slice of pizza and MUCH less than a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup. You should buy a copy.

Cheatin’ Horndogs, Vibrators in the Refrigerator, and Tarot Cards that Indicate Infidelity

Tarot cards that indicate infidelity in a relationship.

“She just started liking cheating songs,
And what’s bothering me,
I don’t know if it’s the cheating she likes,
Or just the melody.” – John Anderson

If you read Tarot cards for other people, you’ll find that one of the major topics that those people want to know about is love and romance.

Is she the right one for me?
Does he feel the same about me that I feel about him?
Should I ask her out?
Should we move in together?
Are we meant to get married?
Will this relationship last?

And, of course, with love and romance there are frequently questions about fidelity and cheating. Most marriages and relationships are, “monogamous,” which is derived from the Greek, meaning, “keep your dick in your pants,” (except when you’re with me.) A very large part of the marital and partnership contract is that when we fall in love we’ll be sexually and emotionally exclusive to that one other person.

Just the Tarot by Dan Adair – a kindle ebook available on Amazon

Having sex with or becoming emotionally attached to a third party is seen as a major violation of that contract and is grounds for terminating it. And there are major penalties that go along with that violation, such as being locked out of your house in your bathrobe, or having your partner pour maple syrup all over your best clothes just before she throws them out into the front yard. And many times, it’s not even REAL maple syrup, it’s that cheap, artificially flavored crap like Mrs. Butterworths.

Quite naturally, then, people who are cheating on their partners will go to great lengths to conceal it. And, quite naturally, the partner who’s being cheated on will somehow know, on a very deep, almost psychic level, that their mates are being unfaithful. There may be extremely subtle, subliminal clues, such as your husband having a giant hickey on his neck, or finding a pair of jockey shorts under the pillow when you wear boxer shorts. Or perhaps coming home early from work and seeing a naked man running out your back door, or finding a strange vibrator in the refrigerator next to the carton of eggs.

Those are the kinds of subdued, low key signals that will often make a person stop and ponder if there’s something more going on in their marriage than meets the eye. Still, their partners will tend to deny it. The vibrator in the refrigerator must have accidentally fallen into the grocery bag at the supermarket and really belongs to someone else. The naked man running out the backdoor was the plumber, who was sleepwalking, and was completely shocked when he awakened without clothes while he was working on the dripping faucet in the bathroom. The hickey on your husband’s neck was the result of a near tragic vacuum cleaner accident at work. The jockey shorts under the pillow were meant to be a present and now you’ve gone and ruined the surprise.

Even though these are all perfectly rational, reasonable explanations, there may still be lingering suspicions and so your client will want to consult the Tarot cards to determine the truth. Here are a few cards that may indicate that the questioner’s partner is what is clinically referred to as a, “cheatin’ horndog.”

THE LOVERS REVERSED

The Lovers is obviously THE romantic relationship card in the Tarot deck. It shows that period of time when you’re first together with your romantic partner and the whole world seems magical and glowing. It’s just the two of you, in your shining little garden. Just you and the angels and . . . um . . . that pesky snake climbing up the tree. When it’s reversed, the party’s over, baby. You’ve been thrown out of the garden and it’s time to deal with reality.

THE DEVIL (UPRIGHT OR REVERSED)

The Devil card shows the same two figures from The Lovers card, only things don’t seem to be as peachy anymore. For one thing, instead of an angel hovering over them, there’s a great big horny kind of a goat/bat demon thingie. They’re chained to a black stone or altar and they have tails which are on fire. (Having your tail burst into flames is another one of those subtle signs that there may be something wrong.) The Devil card can mean a lot of rotten things, such as addictions, super negativity, etc, etc,, but in this context – cheatin’ horndogs – it probably indicates a sexual affair that’s going on and it probably indicates that it’s a pretty heavy duty affair that may have strong elements of BDSM. I mean, horny goats, chains and flaming tails? Really?

THE TOWER (UPRIGHT OR REVERSED)

The Tower, as you might guess, is NOT a positive card. It usually indicates a freaking disaster that’s happening right in the middle of our happy little lives. The flash of the lightning bolts indicates that it’s sudden and shocking. It tends to destroy our lives right down to the foundation and then we’ve got to start rebuilding them, piece by piece. Having this show up in a reading about fidelity would indicate the sudden knowledge that your partner has been unfaithful and the relationship has been completely destroyed by that lack of fidelity.

FIVE OF WANDS

The Five of Wands may show up in a relationship where there’s a LOT of emotional turmoil. In the South, they talk about, “fight and fuck,” relationships. These are relationships where the two people involved have huge fights with much screaming and throwing of plates, and then they reconcile and have make-up sex that’s incredibly good. There are spoken phrases in there like, “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” and, “I promise this will never happen again, ‘cause you’re the dumplings in my chicken soup, honey buns.” Yes, I know honey buns and chicken soup are a disgusting combination, but you get the idea. There’s cheating going on, but they’ll probably reconcile and spend the next week in bed.


QUEEN OF WANDS REVERSED

The Queen of Wands has a lot of good characteristics and, among them, is fidelity. If she shows up reversed, there’s a very good chance that someone isn’t practicing that virtue.

ACE OF CUPS REVERSED

The Ace of Cups shows pure, unadulterated love pouring into the world. It tends to appear when someone is just starting off on a new romantic relationship and their hearts are full of love. When it’s reversed, there’s a good chance that their love got adulterated by a cheatin’, adulterating horndog.

THREE OF CUPS REVERSED

Obviously, this is very much of a party hardy card. When it’s upright, it’s healthy, joyous and free partying. When it’s reversed and shows up in this kind of a reading it can indicate that the joy is leaving or that your partner is partying with someone else.

TEN OF CUPS REVERSED

Among other things, the Ten of Cups is the Happy Family card. When it’s reversed it can be a sign that the happy family is breaking up, particularly if it’s a family with children involved.

KNIGHT OF CUPS REVERSED

The Knight of Cups is riding out on a sincere quest for love. Reversed, it indicates that the love wasn’t found.

THREE OF SWORDS

LOL – well . . . yeah . . . that one’s pretty obvious. Stabbed right in the heart.

SEVEN OF SWORDS

The Seven of Swords is all about sneaking around and stealing someone else’s power. This is the kind of person who has an affair right in front of everyone’s eyes and somehow gets away with it. This card also shows up frequently when you’re involved with a malignant narcissist who’s just using you for their own ego gratification.

TWO OF PENTACLES

The Two of Pentacles may show up in a reading like this to indicate someone who’s trying to juggle two different love affairs and keep both of them going.

SIX OF PENTACLES

This may indicate a lover who’s not really giving with a whole, loving heart. Love is being measured out very carefully.

Those are just a few of the red flags that may show up if your questioner wants to know if his or her partner is running around.

Remember to be very careful with these types of readings. Many people are in a great deal of denial when relationships are falling apart and really, really DON’T want you to tell them what you see in the reading. What they want is for you to tell them that they were wrong and that the vibrator in the refrigerator is really just a whipped cream dispenser. If you’re doing a reading for your best friend and you tell her that her husband is playing hide-the-sausage with his secretary, she may not be pleased with you. At all.

And, of course, it’s always possible that the questioner’s partner might NOT be a cheatin’ horn dog. He could just be a rat faced dingleberry, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. In either case, approach this topic with caution. Practice using phrases such as:

It seems that all may not be as it appears.
There’s a certain murkiness here.
There appears to be a fork in the road of life.

Avoid using phrases such as:

I think he’s dipping his wick with your best friend.
She’s a real bottom feeder and believe me, I MEAN bottom.
You should have listened to your mother. By the way, does your mother still have that spare room?

The Seven of Swords, Vampires in Pink Bow Ties, and Malignant Narcissists

Malignant Narcissists as the source of monster legends.

Have you ever been worked over by a malignant narcissist?

Perhaps an incredibly charming person appeared in your life and he or she seemed to absolutely worship you.  You were told to an almost embarrassing extent how perfect you were, how beautiful, how intelligent, how sexy.  You fell in love, let down all of your guards and boundaries, and within a year that same person was constantly devaluing your opinions and your self worth and telling you that you just weren’t quite good enough.  You were too fat or too skinny or not very bright or not very well informed or your hair was too long or too short or you weren’t very satisfying in bed.

Or perhaps it was a family member, someone you’d always been fond of and trusted, but you find that they’re actually tearing you down and belittling you to other family members when you’re not there.

Or perhaps it’s a co-worker that you liked and opened up to about your personal life when you had a couple of drinks too many on a Friday night.  On Monday morning you’re shocked to discover that your drinking buddy has shared your personal, “secrets,” not only with all of your co-workers but with your boss, as well.  

There’s a common reaction from anyone who’s been chopped up and spit out by a malignant narcissist and that reaction is bewilderment.

“How could I have been so stupid?”

“Why didn’t I see this coming?”

“But . . . I thought he loved me . . .”

“She totally got under my radar.”

For whatever scant comfort it may provide, you’re in extremely good company.  Some of the smartest, most empathetic, highly evolved people in the world have been taken to the emotional cleaners by malignant narcissists.  It’s what they do and they’re experts at it.  It has NOTHING to do with how intelligent you are, how attractive you are, or how evolved you are.  To a malignant narcissist, you’re just a tasty snack.

The Seven of Swords is a perfect image of a malignant narcissist.  He’s stealing someone else’s power, as represented by the swords slung over his shoulder.  The flaps on the tent are closed, showing that the person he’s stealing from is totally unaware of what he’s doing.  And even the guard posted outside of the tent – representing our conscious mind – seems to not register what’s going on.

If we type, “malignant narcissist,” into a search engine, we’ll get a huge number of results.  There are literally thousands of articles and videos discussing what they do to other people, how they do it, and why they’re malignant narcissists to begin with.  Really, it’s kind of astounding when we realize that they only comprise 5% of the population.  To put it one way, they seem to have an over-sized footprint.  To put it another way, they’ve fucked with an AWFUL lot of us.

Although the term, “malignant narcissist,” is fairly new, there’s nothing new about this personality type.  In the past, they’ve been referred to as sociopaths, psychopaths, monomaniacs, and, “utterly without a conscience.”

And my favorite term for them:  monsters.

There is something positively inhuman about malignant narcissists.  They seem to have absolutely no sense of empathy or compassion.  They have no conscience and remorse.  And, far from being intelligent in the sense that most of us might use the term, their intelligence is more on the level of a vicious animal, a predator hunting down its prey.

We don’t even have to bend reality too much to see the malignant narcissist as the probable source of all of the, “monster,” legends that human cultures have promulgated.  Vampires, for instance, were seen as beings with no souls, no compassion, who fed on their victims and destroyed them in the process.  That’s a pretty good description of a malignant narcissist.

Of course, one of the things that folklore tells us about vampires is that they didn’t have any reflection in a mirror, which would drive a malignant narcissist nuts. They like to see how beautiful they are.  It might have been the reason that vampires were always on the prowl for fresh victims:  not just for fresh blood, but for more feedback.

“So . . . before I bite into your jugular vein and drain all of the life out of you, let me ask you one question.  How do I look in this outfit?”

“Wha . . . wha . . . WHAT?”

“This outfit.  How do I look?  The tuxedo and the string tie.  Too much?  Does it make me look pale?  I can’t see myself in the mirror, you know, and I’m just dying to know what you think of it.”

“Well . . . I mean . . . it is a little stark, I guess.  Just black and white is kind of . . . I don’t know . . . a little visually boring.  It could maybe use a touch of color.”

“Ah HA!  Precisely what I was thinking!  Just a dash of something a little brighter.  A red cummerbund, perhaps, or even a pink bow tie.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t go with pink.  Pink just isn’t . . . you.  Red would be fine.  Red would match your eyes and it’s more of a statement of who you really are.  You know:  the whole blood thing.  You could probably even get away with a deep magenta, but no pink.”

“Ah, thank you, thank you.  This conversation has been really invaluable to me.  Now, just one more thing before I kill you.  How do you like this hairstyle?  I’ve been thinking less hair gel and more curls . . .”

We can extend the vampire metaphor even further.  Like vampires, malignant narcissists just . . . won’t . . . stay . . . fucking . . . DEAD.  When we finally get enough of them and tell them to get lost, they just keep coming back for another drink of our blood.  It really does feel like we’d have to drive a stake through their hearts, cut their heads off, and stuff their mouths full of garlic cloves to finally make them shut up and leave us the fuck alone.

And, of course, malignant narcissists can’t stand the light of day.  When they’re finally fully exposed for what they are, they crumble into dust.  It becomes totally apparent that there’s no human substance to them, that there’s nothing there but sharp teeth and a giant ego.

One final thing that they have in common with vampires is that they count on us to make that one flawed decision that leads us to our own destruction, which is to get involved with them in the first place.  We all know that scene in the old Dracula movies where the Intrepid Traveller is standing in front of the horrible creepy castle.  There’s blood dripping down the walls, bats are flying in and out of the windows, wolves are howling in the distance and the Traveller looks at all of that and says, “By golly, I think I’ll knock on the door and see if anyone’s at home.”

The entire theater audience is mentally shrieking, “No, no, don’t get in there, stupid!  He’ll bite your throat!  Stay at the Motel 8 instead.  I know the rooms are tiny, but there are good locks and they have those little coffee machines.”

The same thing happens with malignant narcissists.  If we don’t go through their door, we don’t get our throats bitten and have the life force drained out of us.  It may well be that most of us will never be smart enough to deal with malignant narcissists effectively.  They are, after all, apex predators.  

What we can do, though, is to learn to recognize them.  If someone shows up in our lives and they’re so charming that it’s hard to believe – don’t believe it.  If someone is love-bombing us WAY too early in the relationship, ask ourselves why they’re doing it.  If it feels like love at first sight, take a good, hard second look.  

And take a good hard look at their histories.  One of the things I’ve noticed about malignant narcissists is that they have virtually NO social media presence.  Which is odd, when we think about it, because narcissists love, love, love to talk about themselves.  Malignant narcissists, on the other hand, are terrified of people they’ve exploited blowing their cover so they have no desire to leave a record on social media.  If you knew how many ex-lovers they’d left in bloody tatters, you’d run like hell in the opposite direction.

Finally, if you’ve been victimized by a malignant narcissist even once, or if you had parents who were narcissists, I’d HIGHLY recommend watching Dr. Ramani’s series of videos on YouTube.  

David Carradine, The Higher Self, and Holes Which Don’t Exist

A brief exploration of the meaning of life as illustrated by a Chinese instruction manual.

A few years ago I was assembling a shelf that had been manufactured in China and trying to decode the instructions manual for putting it together.  There were the usual directives – “insert screws A into holes B” – and I was following them quite efficiently when I read a line that stopped me dead in my tracks:

“DO NOT PUT THE BOLT WHICH IS NOT SUPPLIED INTO THE HOLE WHICH DOES NOT EXIST.”

I stared at that sentence for several moments and realized that I had to stop and think about it because it just sounded so . . . profound.  Particularly since it had come from China which, as we all know, is a Land of Mystery which is virtually overrun with Wise Sages who utter Profound Things pretty much all of the time.

Had a Taoist Priest somehow infiltrated the Chinese shelf factory and quietly scattered deep truths in all of the instruction manuals?  I immediately visualized Master Po, the Shaolin priest on the old Kung Fu television series, looking at young David Carradine and saying, “When you can place the bolt which is not supplied into the hole which does not exist, then it will be time for you to go, Grasshopper.”

Sadly, as much as I turned the phrase over and over in my mind, I was unable to glean any universal wisdom from it.  It could be that I just haven’t reached the level of clarity and insight that will allow me to penetrate to its true meaning.  Or it might have been a typo.

In either case, the memory always makes me think about instruction manuals and the fact that all human beings come into the world supplied with them.

One of the most discomfiting experiences in life is to suddenly pop into a little higher realm of thought and wonder, “What in the holy FUCK am I doing here?”  That can also be expressed as, “What’s the meaning of life?”  Or, “Does life HAVE any meaning?  Or even, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

All human beings yearn for meaning in one form or another.  We want to feel that we’ve somehow made a difference, that we’ve learned something, that we’ve touched other people’s hearts and spirits in our strange little trips through the Earth School.  When we actually stop and ask ourselves if our lives really mean anything, it can feel like we’re waking up on a train that’s hurtling along in the dark of night, we have NO idea how we got on the train, we don’t know where the train’s going, we don’t seem to have any ID cards in our wallets and, for some peculiar reason, we can’t quite remember who we are.

Life without a sense of meaning reduces us to feeling, as Alan Watts put it, as if we’re some sort of strange living tubes that suck in food at one end and excrete it at the other for no apparent purpose until we die.

Of course, one answer to that is to become Existentialists.  We can proclaim that life has NO meaning other than that which we personally give it and that we somehow find our meaning by embracing our meaninglessness.  That way we can go from the position of, “I don’t have a fucking clue,” to the position of, “I don’t have a fucking clue and isn’t it amazing of me to admit it?”

I mean, it’s not much of a position to take in life, but at least it’s a position.  Plus, if you’re an Existentialist, you get to be tragically hip, dress in a lot of dark clothes and frequently gaze off into the distance as if you’re in deep thought, when you’re really just thinking about what to eat for lunch.

There’s an alternative position, though, which some of the Eastern religions take and which has sort of filtered its way into the New Age/New Thoughts movements.  And that’s that we know precisely why we’re here but we’ve just forgotten.

I know, I know . . . it sounds a little far fetched.  How could we possibly forget what our purpose in life is?  Well, we forget where we put our car keys all of the time and they’re a lot easier to keep track of.

Think of it this way:  we’re hanging around out in the universe in between incarnations and we think, “Hey, you know what?  I think I’m going to incarnate on Earth!  That could be fun!  And I have this particular lesson that I need to learn and Earth might just be the perfect place to learn it.”

So before we reincarnate, we run through our pre-incarnation check list so that we can maximize our chances of learning what we need to learn.  “Let’s see . . . do I want to be born into a rich family or a poor family?  What race do I want to be?  What country do I want to be born into?  Should my parents be good people or assholes?  Do I want a penis or a vagina?  Decisions, decisions, decisions . . .”  

Then, when we’ve got everything figured out, we wait for the next opportunity to jump into a body.  “Oh, boy, here comes that sperm cell and it looks like it’s going to get to the egg and it’s getting closer and it’s crossing the finish line and – YES! – the next incarnation mission has successfully launched!  That’s one small step for man and one giant step for . . .”  

Well, you get the idea.  If all goes well and we make it through the next nine months of gestation – SHAZAM! – here we are on planet Earth, a human being, all ready to learn our lessons and fulfill our purpose for being here.  

Only, somewhere along the line, we forgot what our purpose was.

How embarrassing.  Don’t tell anyone.

Fortunately (or not, depending on our perspective), there are a lot of distractions here on planet Earth and we go on a lot of mini-missions.  We start with things like, “I wanna get fed and I want my diapers changed.”  Then, as we get older, we concentrate on things like, “I want to get laid and I want to get OUT of this goddamned high school.”  And then we move on to, “I want a partner.  I want a house.  I want a car.  I want a new computer.  I want a better job.”

It all gets very complex but, still, every once in a while, that little voice pops up and asks, “Does this mean anything?  Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?”

It’s a terrifying question but it’s even more terrifying when we feel like there’s an answer but we can’t quite put our finger on it.

Which is where a spiritual practice comes in.

Most spiritual practitioners will tell us that that part of us, the one who said, “Hey, I think I want to incarnate on Earth and hang out there for a while,” is still with us, right here, right now, just waiting for us to ask it what in the hell we’re doing here.  You know . . . if we can pause long enough from eating and having sex and shopping on Amazon.

Some religions call it a, “Soul,” which I don’t much care for because the christian fundamentalists have pretty much yucked that up.  Other practices might refer to it as our, “Higher Self,” or our Spirit.  

People who meditate a lot will tell us that when we sit long enough watching our thoughts we become aware of the fact that there is another, “us,” sitting and watching and THAT’S the Higher Self.  Not our bodies, not our emotions, not our thoughts, but another, “us,” who is profoundly wise and deeply connected with our purpose for being here.

People who blast off on an acid trip or take a lot of magic mushrooms will frequently encounter that Higher Self and maybe zip around the astral plane with it.  Shamans who go on Spirit Quests are looking to have a little conversation with their Souls.  Even brain researchers like Jeffrey M. Schwartz posit the existence of a, “Wise Counselor,” who’s here to guide us and floats above our everyday lives.

The point is that the Wise Counselor, the Higher Self, the Spirit . . . that’s who’s got our instruction manuals.  That’s the part of us who knows why in the hell we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing.  That’s the part of us who can tell us how to put the bolt which is not supplied into the hole which doesn’t exist.

So it becomes vitally important that we engage with that part of our being.  That we actively seek answers through whatever means will get us into communication with our Higher Selves.  For some of us that might mean meditation.  For others, ecstatic dance or yoga.  For others, psychedelics.  There is ALWAYS a gate for each one of us that leads us back to our Higher Selves.  We just have to look for it.

Once we find it, once we accomplish our purpose here in Earth school, once we learn how to put the bolt which is not supplied into the hole which doesn’t exist, then it will be time for us to go.

Grasshopper.